Arx-Han: The best definition of inceldom is not a young man who can't find sex, it's a young man or a man of any age who can't find romantic love, and i. e. who struggles with meaning. I think the deepest and truest definition of the incel is a person who feels that their life is meaningless. And they are a very modern permutation of a, of course, much more ancient problem.

Steve Hsu: Welcome to Manifold.

Arx-Han: My guest today is ARX-Han, an anonymous author and expert on human relations, the state of literature today, and evolutionary psychology. Han, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here, Steve. I am a very big fan of your work in this show and I am a frequent listener. So, very grateful to be here.

Steve Hsu: My pleasure. And let me tell the audience why I invited you. Obviously I became aware of you on the internet. And I, at the time, glanced at your novel, which is called Incel. And we'll spend, you know, at least a chunk of time, I think, in this interview discussing your novel, but I want to discuss maybe some broader topics as well.

But then, following up on your novel, I sort of listened to some other interviews you had given over the years, and I was impressed by your overall insight into topics like, literary novels, the state of modern society, the state of status of young men in society. So I found you to be very insightful, and I thought this would be a conversation that my audience would enjoy.

Arx-Han: Perfect. It's my pleasure to get into those topics.

Steve Hsu: Great.

So let's start just by introducing your novel. Hopefully we'll goose up your sales a little bit.

Arx-Han: The novel is titled Incel, and if I had to describe it, like, I was talking to my son earlier today, and I was telling him I'm going to interview a novelist, and he said, oh, what did he write? And I, the way I would explain it, in my mind, this may not be the best way to explain it, but to me, it's sort of like a 2010 ish update of American Psycho, in which the main character is not a killer, a psycho killer, but his main difficulty is in basically getting laid, having sex with women. And he views the world in a very mechanistic sort of autistic way, which is heavily informed by evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology. Having said it that way, maybe you could react to it, and then maybe you could give the way that you describe the novel to people when you're constrained by, to do it succinctly. Absolutely. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that is, a pretty good characterization of the novel, given that Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote American Psycho, certainly was one of my primary Literary influences, and, his style is characterized by a sort of literary maximalism, where he really leans into, this kind of male coded, literary type autism with, a heavy reliance on descriptive detail and things, things of that nature.

If I were to characterize my novel in a single sentence, I would call it a biomaterialist tragic comedy about a young American incel of the 2010s era. And I'll learn two terms there. By biomaterialist what I mean is this intense focus on, sort of various forms of scientific reductionism applied to intimate human affairs like love and relationships and tragic comedy because it sort of oscillates by design between the extremes of sort of absurdity and deeply painful experiences that are nonetheless very sad and in many ways existentially wrought.

Steve Hsu: Now, I found the novel to be very well written, and it's not the easiest thing to read, I think, for most people, because the narrator, the main character, is himself a graduate student in evolutionary psychology. And he explains everything that happens in his life, as you mentioned, from the most intimate to the most mundane in terms of some analogy, which comes from, evolutionary psychology, even a particular, for example, scientific paper, which he might quote, in his description of what's happening, happening to him.

For example, in the opening scene, he's at a club and he's trying to pick up a girl. And he's sort of describing her decision, you know, not to go home with him or not to continue the conversation with him. It's just a flat out sort of evaluation that he's, you know, his fitness level is too low for her or something like this.

Arx-Han: But I found it, you know, in a way, it's very stilted to have the main character. think and operate that way. But, I think you do a very good job of developing that kind of person. Yeah, thank you very much. I certainly had a lot of fun writing the novel. And it does kind of have this experimental streak to it because part of the thought process that went into writing it, came from a place of, of looking at these concepts in evolutionary psychology or cognitive science of applying these sorts of abstractions to, human experience that and then sort of kind of inserting them into a person's day to day life because he sort of hyper fixated on these, these things as a way of kind of understanding, his reality, his social reality.

Steve Hsu: You know, it's funny because I've had, both Diana Fleischman and Jeffrey Miller on my podcast, and I would even count them as personal friends. And, they're professionals in this field. They do research in this field. You may have even quoted some of their papers in the novel. But you go a step beyond, which is you reach this, sort of, what I would call very online kind of way of using that research to understand life and society, which, you know, starting in the early 2000s or so, you, you just saw this online so often, like some very online autist is writing about, you know, his, his inability to X or his wish to accomplish Y and then he's, he's, he's describing the whole thing in these sort of scientific terms in terms of Evo psych.

Arx-Han: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, a lot of the, a lot of the book is about creating this polarization between, the phenomenology of moment to moment lived experience, which of course feels nothing like computation and contrasting that to the sort of, computer science or psychology based abstractions as to what the brain is doing closer to quote unquote ground level. And, I am actually familiar with Miller and, and, and Fleshman and, you know, I, I haven't followed their work very closely. The papers that are quoted in the novel are either kind of inspired by real papers or sort of, stylized exaggerations of actual abstracts that I encountered.

But, you know, with literary fiction, I think the greatest joy comes from experimenting with the form rather than, retreading, you know, sort of more trope-like, styles, for example. And one of the reasons that it was so much fun to write was because the current trend right now is a kind of MFA style literary minimalism. And going in the opposite direction, you know, zigging if everyone is zagging, was one of the things that kind of motivated me to take that very extreme experimental style.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, let me bookmark two things that you just mentioned. So one is the idea that at bottom, we might be performing some kind of neural net comp. computation, which has been shaped by evolution, et cetera, et cetera, or our DNA. But the way we experience it as humans is obviously very different. And that's almost the theme of my podcast.

So I, for example, today I released an episode in which I talked to this philosopher, AI researcher, Yosha Bach, and he, you know, he, he's, he's very interested in, in, in this phenomenology as well. The second thing I want to come back to later is your ideas about the current state of literary fiction, which I, I think I agree with you, is pretty problematic, at the moment. It's, it's been super feminized, for example. But, let's, let's, let's do that after we go deeper into your novel, because I really want the reader or the listener to actually have some idea of this novel. I think it's very funny and if you can tolerate the fact that the, that the, the narrator is this sort of hyper-autist, very online, kind of, you know, somewhat racist guy. You know, the kind of guy that I think all of us have encouraged anybody who's online themselves has encountered in discussion forums or chat rooms or something, over time or on Twitter. I feel we're not doing it justice. So the reader, if you're at all interested, go to Amazon and read the excerpt and you'll get a sense of, of, of the novel.

But I thought we would delve a little bit deeper into what actually transpires in the novel before we go on to those other topics.

Arx-Han: Sounds good. I'm happy to take it there.

Steve Hsu: Great. So the main character is a white guy, a grad student in evolutionary psychology. I think he says explicitly I'm not autistic during the course of the novel, but what do you think of him? Do you think of him as an autist or just someone who's too, you know, wedded to scientism?

Arx-Han: Yeah, I think it's a great question. I would say that canonically I think this character is kind of in a gray zone, right? And the, the story kind of plays with this idea of what actually even is autism at the margins of a person being what would be considered high functioning, right? Because obviously, you know, when you refer to autism, you know, what you're really doing is you're using an umbrella term to capture a very broad range of psychological pathology, right? You know, you're, it's used in a sort of colloquial sense to describe, you know, tech bros, but of course, there are people who are profoundly disabled by the disorder, and when it's used in sort of online casual parlance as a sort of a jab or as a sort of a joke, in many cases, a self deprecating joke. They're obviously not referring to, you know, people who are, you know, intellectually disabled, and unable to communicate, you know, as a result of, the disorder or a concurrent disorder associated with that.

So, in the book, you know, the narrator indicates that he doesn't believe that he has the diagnosis. He's sort of implying that he wouldn't, you know, meet quote unquote, you know, medical criteria for it. But at the same time, you know, he does exhibit, you know, a, a, a strain of having tremendous difficulty reading, understanding, and reacting to human social cues. And in a sense that that lack of capacity is kind of the narrative engine for the book and he sort of treats this this domain of social relations almost like an area of an unexplored, kind of continent that he, him, as some sort of old style Victorian naturalist must discover and uncover the secrets of, right? And, and, and that's why he makes these jokes about beings that are sort of kind of, you know, Darwinian figure in, in the sense that he's a, he sees himself as a scientist.

So, according to the way that I wrote it, he's not necessarily, kind of quote unquote falling into a diagnostic box, but he certainly has these characteristics. And I think that sort of mirrors how it works in real life. Because, you know, if you actually sit down and, and, you know, you go to a psychiatrist or somebody like that, you know, really they're kind of just looking at a checklist, right? And then, the scoring of these checklists can be very subjective. You know, I would imagine, although I haven't actually looked up the literature for this, but my assumption would be that the inter-rater reliability for something like high functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder at the margin is, is quite poor.

I'd be surprised if that wasn't the

Steve Hsu: Yeah, you're probably right.

But the question that I was trying to get at here is, and you answered it, is whether this guy has poor theory of mind in trying to understand what other people are thinking and feeling, or his theory of mind's capability is actually okay, but he just insists on thinking of everything in these very evolutionary terms.

Because I do know people whose theory of mind is not great, but it's, it's actually not, certainly not in some kind of, outlier, you know, state. I mean, they're, they're sort of in the average range, but they insist on thinking of the world the way your main character thinks about the world.

Arx-Han: Yeah, yeah. Obviously the meta critique is, is very much the latter, right? And to, to kind of double click on that, you know, if you look at the prevailing quote unquote online manosphere consensus of the early 2010s era,what, what you had really was this heavily ideologically warped, misinterpretation of evolutionary psychology that was sort of popularized and, and kind of just went through this Tumblr of, you know, dilution and slash broken telephone, where you had real research that was being done that in many cases was probably not very high quality.

And then it was, you know, spun into memorable kind of memes and, and, and stories in popular books, like most of which I haven't actually read. And then it hit the blogosphere, right. And so by the time you get to that, you know, third point, what, you know, whatever iota of scientific truth that was there has really been degenerated and modified to basically sort of soothe the painful experiences of alienated young men.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, you know, the, the person who's really good at, this is Jeffrey Miller, because he obviously knows the literature quite well, but also, like, for a while, he was working with a guy called Tucker Max, I don't know if you know that name, but,

Arx-Han: I do. I'm familiar.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So he, he also has had direct contact with lots of young men who are, who are like your narrator.

And, in various interviews, you could find him making these subtle differentiations between, you know, what, what really could be inferred from the scientific studies and the way these ideas are interpreted, you know, online.

Arx-Han: Yeah. And I think the reason this is salient is because it cuts to the core of the question of meaning, right? And I mean, one of the, one of the themes of the book is this idea of materialist reductionism being a kind of acid that dissolves, meaning in life. Right. So, just to give one of several examples, you know, if you assume, what philosophers will refer to as, you know, the, the, the causal closure of, of, you know, the physical world, i. e. that, only physical forces can produce causation in the physical world. If you assume that to be the case, then what it does is it sort of appears to lend itself towards this kind of nihilistic decomposition of all of the choices in your life, right? I. e. it, it, it starts to look something like a kind of, hardened compatibilism where, you know, the phenomenological experience of free will is illusory and therefore by extension, the choices that a person makes are illusory.

And evolutionary psychology, I think, very easily lends itself toward, a feeling of nihilism because it becomes very straightforward to take these transcendental experiences like love and intimacy and connection and to sort of decompose them into cognitive science or psychology abstractions about optimization algorithms for genetic reproduction, which, of course, can in turn be decomposed into, you know, just the, physics of atoms in your brain and, and, and, and so on.

So, I'm using a philosopher's language here, not a, not a physicist language, of course. But I think my, my mental model of what makes the young modern incel, different from young alienated men in eons past is that I do think that there is kind of something historically new about this current lens of scientific reductionism applied to human relationships that simply didn't apply previously.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So I think this is a good point.

So, the idea of the incel is quite old. And, you know, in, for example, in East Asia, the idea that lots of young men are not going to be able to reproduce because in those societies, if they lack sufficient wealth. They were not going to have a wife. And so, I think there's even a term like empty branches on it, like on a, on a, a tree, a genealogical tree, like the young men who weren't able to reproduce.

So, the idea that there are sort of angry, frustrated incels in society, at any given time is an old idea, but what, what, what's new about your take is that partially because of the internet and partially just because of the development of fields like evolutionary psychology. there's a subset of them that, will, perceive their inceldom specifically through this lens.

And so I, I agree with you, that's a somewhat historically new phenomenon. I wonder, like, I would guess there are a lot of incels in the world today who are just guys who aren't particularly scientific in their outlook, they're just not very good with women. Like maybe they're unattractive, or they lack testosterone, or aggression, or theory of mind, or whatever, but they don't necessarily see it the way your narrator sees it.

But I found that particular character quite interesting.

Arx-Han: Yeah, and I, I think that's, you know, when you write a book, you want to examine the part of a phenomenon that's sort of historically novel. and departs from, you know, the continuity of the past, right? And, and, yeah, certainly throughout history, of course, there have been, you know, men who were unable to find a partner to reproduce, right?

but there, there, there does seem to be some particular mix of factors that have really kind of amplified this in, I think, contemporary times. And, and it's, it's a new mutation, you know, one might say in, in, in the West right now.

Steve Hsu: Well, so there's a new, there's one thing that's new, which is, you know, thinking, viewing your own inceldom through the kind of lens that your narrator does. So that is pretty new, I think. Second thing you might be saying is that the way society is structured these days with, you know, women being much more empowered or, you know, some other factors, there's, there are other, there's a new manner in which people are forced to become incels.

I think there's sort of two separate things there.

Arx-Han: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so for example, you know, there, there are different cultural instantiations of, of the same underlying phenomenon, but I think the way that in contemporary times that, people self identify with this as a category of identity, I think that is a sort of novel phenomenon, you know, and, and we...

Steve Hsu: Would you date that to Elliot Rodger?

Arx-Han: So I'm, I'm not a, I wouldn't say that I'm a kind of, deeply knowledgeable about the sort of historical lineage of how the term originated and mutated. My understanding based on, you know, articles that I've read is that it actually originated, with a woman. But I think that, of course, Elliot Roger's manifesto and, you know, mass, mass killing, were certainly an inflection point in terms of the meme of the incel becoming supercharged and entering, you know, the, the zeitgeist as it were. And Roger is quite a complex figure and also kind of one that provokes a lot of interesting discourse just because the quote unquote manifesto that he left behind was sufficiently detailed and biographical that it almost presents itself as a kind of psychological autopsy, which is in many cases not really available after the fact when one of these kind of mass casualty attacks takes place. And there's just so much going on there. I know, for example, that a sub-stacker by the name of or slash blogger by the name of Michael Cromson in New York, who's been associated with dime square had written a number of pieces, where he took a literary analysis of that document.

not to, you know, sort of, elevate it in any way, shape or form, but just to, I think more so as a piece of psychoanalysis, but, you know, the sociological trends that are driving inceldom in modern society, are, I think, another sort of complicated, sort of academic question and, and, you know, there are many things that we can kind of obviously attribute it to,say things like, you know, economic, development, like economic trends where, you know, there's more of a bifurcation in terms of, winners and losers in, in the economy. And so, you know, even just material resources are more likely to accrue to a smaller fraction of men.

But for me, the book was less a commentary about sociological driving forces. And more of a kind of qualitative case study, of a single individual who may not necessarily be representative of the broader group of incels as a whole.

And I would note that, incels aren't necessarily, the, the, the media depiction of the modern incel, I think, is very much that of a sort of, young, angry white male who is, at risk of political radicalization and, and terrorism, and while that certainly does describe a subset of them, if my understanding is that if you actually look at the, the research, for example, there's a guy named William Costello, who's, who's done some research in this area, it actually is a very heterogeneous group, that cuts across a number of different slices of society.

I think of it more so as a kind of end state phenomenon that's being driven by the conversions of numerous different factors. And, if you look at the population of young men who are functionally in this category, on a graph, I mean, it looks like a hockey stick graph. Like if you were an investor, you know, you'd invest in that number going up.

Right. I mean, not, not, not that that would be a good thing, but, I, yeah, go ahead.

Steve Hsu: Let me just jump in and say a couple things. So first of all, for the listening audience, if you're not familiar with Elliot Rodger and you know, I'm sure like if you're a certain age, a guy of a certain age, or you're very heavily online, you know who Elliot Rodger is. But for a lot of my audience, you know, who are old academics or something, they have no idea what we're talking about.

So Elliot Rodger was a student at UC Santa Barbara who went on a killing spree. And he killed his roommates in Isla Vista, and then he killed some, I think, sorority girls, and, later they found his manifesto, and he was deeply frustrated, I mean, basically incel. He happened to be mixed race, so half Asian, half Caucasian, had a bunch of, self loathing over that, had real issues with women, et cetera, et cetera.

But the, the, the math, the whole story about Elliot Roger and what he wrote in his manifesto, I think, or I don't know if it's actually a manifesto or more of a diary, but, in any case, it's very fascinating if you're interested in the subject. So I recommend people in the audience who want to learn about the incel,modern incel phenomenon. I think Elliot Rodger is an interesting place to start.

The other thing I just want to mention is that, your novel is pre, the takeover of online dating apps, right? So the, the, the main character is actually trying to meet women in a bar. And so that's a slightly earlier era. Some people claim that with the advent of dating apps, you have this phenomenon where a woman who's sort of average can be the booty call for a super attractive male. So you have these males that are on the apps and the apps allow them to sort of scale their impact. So if you're a super attractive male, you can have booty calls with girls whenever you want, but they're not necessarily, say you're nine.

The girl that you're having the booty call with is not necessarily a nine. The fives, the women who are fives and sevens don't want to date male fives and sevens because they can occasionally be the booty call of a male nine. And I, I think at least online, people sometimes attribute the rise of, in part, to the dominance of the dating apps and the phenomenon that I just described.

I'm wondering if you, if, if you find that to be plausible at all.

Arx-Han: Well, I, I think there's so many interesting threads there too, to sort of pull on, right, in terms of kind of modeling these, intergender dynamics, right? So, I, you know, I think broadly speaking that I think in, in terms of the online gender discourse, you know, that, that model of the modern dating app being this kind of perfectly efficient distribution mechanism to allow, you know, the top echelon of men to basically access, you know, any women they want and then those women kind of, sort of imprint imprinting on this top echelon of men is kind of a standard bearer. And then that creates a kind of,sort of. increase over time in terms of sort of what might be considered, you know, an adequate mate.

Certainly, I think the story makes a lot of sense. I have, however, seen that data contested online. But memory escapes me in terms of who had contested it and, and how actually weak, the empirical grounding for that was.

My recollection is that, the amount of, you know, quote unquote hookups that were actually taking place, taking place, you know, through these apps was actually over, it was held to be overstated. So I do think there is still some controversy about to what extent that's happening and to what extent other kinds of maybe less obvious and more kind of oblique mechanisms might actually just be depressing, the amount of, you know, dating and mating that's taking place in general. So, for example, a lot of people go onto these apps and it provides us a kind of simulation of companionship, a simulation of going on a date, and then they kind of flake on the dates or they don't go out on the dates at all. And it, it sort of wets a certain degree of appetite without actually leading to, you know, the, any, any sort of physical connection at all.

And my understanding is that if you actually look at data with, say, you know, Gen Z, they are, they're kind of less active in this kind of, you know, whatever you want to call it, dating slash mating frequency relative to previous generations. And so it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually the main thing. That seems to, or one of the primary factors rather than just merely the apps themselves might actually just be the phone itself, right? And I think the, the, the kind of, the phone is a sort of source of dopamine and distraction and, and, and, and, and providing a window into simulated experiences. And, you know, my understanding when I, when I look at the writing of, or the, or the, you know, tweets by, you know, guys like, Marco Jukic at, Palladium Mag is that nobody really knows why fertility in general is being depressed so dramatically, right?

And, and it seems just like the whole thing is kind of like an open empirical question and incels are just a subset of that question of depressed fertility. So to me, it, it, in many ways, I think. You can, you can arrive at these highly intuitive explanations, but I, my sense is that the world is more complex and, and the answers,then, then we would, then we would initially assume, and the answers might be a little bit more elusive than that kind of anecdote would suggest.

Steve Hsu: I, I think I agree with you that we don't really know the reason for either for fertility decline or for the rise, if there is a rise, or I think there is a rise of incel notoriety among young men. So I don't think we really fully understand what's happening.

This phenomenon of Hypergamy is amplified by dating apps. I think another guest I had in the show Rob Henderson who's I think gosh, I think he might be younger than you he, he definitely, I think, did live through that era, when he was an undergrad at Yale, and I think he, he has at least anecdotal stories about, about friends who did sort of shockingly well on the apps, and then other friends who couldn't get a date on the app.

So I, at least anecdotally, think that kind of amplification of inequality in the dating market seems to be true. But you know, I, I, the best thing would be of course, to look at, you know, OkCupid data or something and look at like, what, what, what exactly are these not, you know, male nines up to versus the male fives, I guess, I guess I always had this marked in my head as plausible, but not high confidence that this is actually how it's working out.

But, anyway, I would love to have a day at OkCupid there and look at their data.

Arx-Han: Yeah, I mean, you know they pulled that famous blog post from 2013 where they, where they published all the data around race and dating and, you know. So, yeah, they keep that close to the chest now, I'm sure.

Steve Hsu: I think there were two that were obviously very impactful, you know, in the meme space. And the other one is, that men, if, if men rate women for attractiveness, the peak attractiveness, even as the male gets older and older and older, the peak attractiveness of the woman that they want is around age 22 or something.

So, but whereas it doesn't work that way with women, women, women are rating older, you know, men who are roughly their age as, as being the, either the most attractive or the ones they think they have to settle for. But yeah, so that was, that was another for feminists, very damaging, you know, bit of data analysis.

Okay, coming back to the book, the main character's best friend is an Asian American, he's Korean American, he's sort of hyper masculine, he's a big, strong guy and participates in MMA and gets in fights and things like this. Now, I think you yourself are Asian American, I'm curious what you were thinking when you wrote it as main character is white, but best friend is Asian American, and there's, you know, a certain amount of racism, you know, the kind of, like, HBD, racism that would have been common for, you know, men, well, maybe still is common for highly on online men of this type.

What were your thoughts in terms of formulating that relationship?

Arx-Han: Yeah. For me, you know, that's actually the most important relationship in the novel, I think, right, because, it's, it's a way of showing these, showing a couple of different things essentially, right? So, the first thing that was of interest to me was depicting an Asian American male character in literary fiction, who is not only sort of masculine, but almost kind of, to an extent one might argue pathologically hyper masculine, right?

And that simply isn't the type of literary character that you really see represented in fiction. And, again, you know, one of the things that compels any writer to write a novel, is to write characters and stories that just haven't been done before, right? And, you know, I've met people like this in real life. I've met, you know, large, muscular, domineering Asian American men who rack up extremely high partner counts and look like a character from Dragon Ball Z, right? But I've never seen that either on screen, or, or, and in particular in, in, in the domain of quote unquote high culture that is literary fiction.

And part of that is, of course, merely a representation problem where, you know, most Asian American writers, who, who write, again, I'm talking about literary fiction, which is that, that, that, that kind of quote, unquote, high culture version of the, of, of, you know, the, you know, the word-cel universe, as it were, you know, heterosexual male writers are just wildly underrepresented, particularly if they're Asian males, right?

So. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a novel like this, that, that, that has a character, who fits into that box.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I'm, I'm actually, I'm actually racking my brain, as someone who's read a lot of literary fiction, I'm actually racking my brain to think of, an example, a counterexample for you, but, you're right, it's very rare.

It's very funny because on Twitter, on X, if, if I ever post like a photo of me wearing my football uniform in college or something, people just go nuts because they think like, oh, this guy's some pointy headed Asian American guy, but, wow, there he is in his you know, playing linebacker or something like this. And yeah, it's very weird how people react to it because they're, they're just not used to it.

Arx-Han: Yeah. And the thing is, is that people like this and people like you exist in real life, but so why shouldn't they exist in a fictional story?

Steve Hsu: Yeah. Yeah.

Arx-Han: so, you know, so, and, and anytime you represent, you present a character, who isn't, you know, frequently depicted, you have the opportunity to do something interesting, right?

You have the, you have the opportunity to say something interesting and to present something interesting. And what I, what I didn't want to do was I didn't want to do the kind of, you know, inverse of what typically happens where, you know, you have the Asian male, I didn't just want to do the inverse of what typically happens because what typically happens or historically has typically happened has been, you know, that kind of 16 candles style, long ducked on presentation of the Asian male as sort of this kind of like clownish, sort of asexual figure, right? I mean, obviously that's, I mean, it's just boring. It's uninteresting. You know, we know that that's a trope at this point, but what I didn't want to do was also, I didn't want to present a racial power fantasy. Right? Because I think a lot of what happens when a writer creates a kind of narrative universe is in a narrative universe, a writer is a kind of God, right?

The writer has the power of creation, right? And I think the easy subconscious impulse is to present a stronger, more beautiful, more powerful, version of yourself that fulfills all of these kinds of fantastical, and narcissistic, self conceptions that you might sort of blatantly exist in your mind. And then it becomes this narrative for wish fulfillment. And then of course, if the character is in any way racialized, whether white or non white, it becomes almost a racial power fantasy. And I didn't want to do that.

I wanted to present a character who is more complicated. Right? And, you know, his, his arc throughout the story begins with this sort of hyper masculinity, but as time goes on, you know, it becomes increasingly apparent that actually this character is quite disturbed and that this hyper masculinity is a sort of reactive response to both trauma, but also this, you know, extraordinarily deflating sense of, you know, scientific reductionism and even depersonalization.

And not really a full spoiler here, but a perhaps a partial spoiler, you know, toward the end of the book, he sort of kind of achieves this sort of neo Buddhist style, dissociation from human affairs altogether, simply by virtue of saying that everything is just the movement of particles, or this or that, right? And he dispenses with notions of moral responsibility altogether.

So, the contrast between this character and the main character, the protagonist, Anon, who's a, he's a white American male, he's a Caucasian male, allowed me to kind of present a, a, a contrast between someone who in the main character still holds on to a hope for something transcendental and somebody else who has really just kind of gone beyond the horizon, really kind of dissociated almost completely.

Steve Hsu: Yes. And, I think that's, maybe it's not apparent when you first pick up the book or look at the cover that really the, the story is about the search of the main character for something beyond this, scientistic view of, human existence,

Arx-Han: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think, you know, I've, I don't remember where I first heard this, but the best definition of inceldom is not a young man who can't find sex, it's a young man or a man of any age who can't find romantic love, and i. e. who struggles with meaning. And so far, I think the deepest and truest definition of the incel is a person who feels that their life is meaningless. And they are a very modern permutation of a, of course, much more ancient problem.

Steve Hsu: When you were writing the book, were you thinking specifically about novels like American Psycho or books by Houellebecq?

Arx-Han: Absolutely. They were both strong influences on me. And, you know, there are some other kinds of more marginal or peripheral influences, but the pairing of them were my two primary kinds of literary reference points. At the same time, I wanted to inject a lot of that sort of.quasi autistic, hyper analytical, abstracted cognitive science, analysis into moment to moment social interactions, because the contrast of that I felt was very interesting and kind of funny. Again, because it returns to that core polarization of Yes, you know, maybe I'm, I'm, I'm looking into the eyes of my lover and we're experiencing this deep connection, but then maybe at the back of my mind, you know, am I troubled by this, this idea that this is, is this all just computation, you know, instantiated in neurons, right?

Does that degrade the meaning of that experience? And so, while Bret Easton Ellis does have that very detailed, rich maximalist style.He doesn't really lean into a lot of these ideas around science and philosophy that I felt were a lot of fun to play with. And so, Houellebecq. on the other hand, does more overtly talk about things like materialism and, and the collapse of meaning in this kind of age of liberalism.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, even, even, even Subatomic Particles, I think. Right, one of his, one of his novels is, is in the title, is it Subatomic Particles or,

Arx-Han: You're very close. The title is called elementary particles, but in French, yes, in French, it's called atomized.

Steve Hsu: Yes.

Arx-Han: yeah. And, and he, this idea of materialist reductionism is a persistent through line through many of his works. And I recall, I think it's from one of his novels, The Possibility of an Island. There are these two characters who, if memory serves me correctly, are discussing the idea of killing a beautiful young woman who has witnessed a crime that they need to cover up. And one of these characters notices that the other one is hesitant to do so. And he says, I know why you're hesitating. It's because she's beautiful. She's a beautiful young woman. And, and then he says, but all you need to understand is that she's nothing, she's nothing more than a, a, a, something like a pattern of frost, a temporary arrangement of particles, you know, that pleases the eye. Right. and so, you know, Houellebecq, famously predicted the phenomenon of the modern incel decades ago in his original novel,titled, whatever, which is about this sort of, it's,middle aged, disaffected computer programmer who is friends with a young incel, and it's, it's just a, an absolutely wrenching novel.

Yeah. about, both of these characters and this kind of modern anomie, that, you know, afflicts, you know, these, these depressed Frenchmen, as it were, his whole, his whole body of work is, is, I think, very

Steve Hsu: good.

Yeah, I wanna, I wanna come back to Houellebecq when we talk about the state of literary fiction today. But, yeah, so it's yet another bookmark. I, I do, I have to relay this anecdote. to you, which you might find amusing, which is that, so I'm old enough that when American Psycho first came out, I guess it was the late 80s or maybe early 90s, I, I was actually hanging out with a bunch of derivatives traders in New York, you know, for a lot of my former physics colleagues, you know, had become, you know, my age had become derivatives traders and they lived in Manhattan and the book came out around that time and, and they found it, you know, really amusing and, and the fact that, you know, every, for people who haven't read the book, you know, on every page, he, the main character is obsessed with things like, the designer labels on other people's clothing or the,you know, the quality of their, business cards, you know, and things like this, and my friends found it, you know, they found it really, who were actually in that world found it incredibly fascinating, you know, but, but ultimately it's, it's kind of just, I don't want to say a trick or, or a kind of a gas, a single note gag, but for you, it's deeper because, you know, the, the, the equivalent of that obsession with these markers of elitism, et cetera, et cetera, in American Psycho becomes for you, this quasi scientific way of viewing, you know, humans as, computational machines or DNA, engines, et cetera, et cetera. It's a deeper, it's a deeper, mechanism, to inject into the book, I think.

Arx-Han: Yeah. And so it's both, it's both a running joke, but also an expression of existential horror. And I think that that sort of tension between. Those two things, is, is, is what carries through, you know, the energy throughout the book itself, like all the way from beginning to end. Right.

and you know, being able to release that hyper analytical lens and to just accept the direct, veridical experience of meaning is, you know, ultimately, the thing that I think moves this character, you know, toward the end of the novel.

But I think everything about our modern world pushes us away from being, deeply present.in a way that would build and cultivate meaning.And I think what's so insidious about, scientism or, or, or reductionism is that it presents itself as a scientific argument when really it's actually a philosophical argument.

Right. Because this, you know, whether or not, you know, the brain is doing a form of computation, as you know, most people I assume would agree, you know, doesn't have some sort of simple linear relationship to meaning. And, I think, prying that open and, and kind of repeatedly examining that from different angles, is what takes up, you know, the bulk of the novel from chapter to chapter.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, that's why I say as a, as a, as a gimmick, a literary gimmick, it's much deeper than the one that Bret Easton Ellis used in American Psycho. you know, as someone who is mostly a materialist. You know, being a working physicist, I accept that, you know, we live in a universe that's governed by, you know, natural laws and mathematical equations.

I think it's always been the case that meaning is something, as you said, philosophical, that, you know, your ape brain can decide what meaning it wants to give or extract from the events or phenomenology of life. It has nothing to do with whether the whole thing is being instantiated on a background of atoms and photons and things like this.

So, I agree with you. It's a philosophical question, not a scientific question. And, you know, you sort of gave the spoiler away, which is that, you know, initially you pick up the book and you might think this is going to be some amusing, tragic comedy about this incel guy and the weird way that he looks at the world.

But in fact, you're actually addressing one of the deep philosophical problems of our time, which is if you accept science, then how do you extract meaning? How do you, how do you come to extract meaning to the events and phenomenology of our lives?

Arx-Han: Yeah. Yeah.

And one, one question that I actually would have for you, Steve, if, if, I hope, I hope you don't mind if I ask you one question, you know, you know, as a, you know, obviously you're a physicist, what's your take on, you know, the hard problem of consciousness? I, like, I'm, I'm very curious about this and, and, I mean, maybe you don't believe the hard problem exists.

Maybe it's just a kind of language game invented by David Chalmers, you know, I don't know. But I, I would love to, I'd love, I'm always curious about this, because I, it's not often that I chat with a physicist.

Steve Hsu: Well, it's,

Arx-Han: At a polymath,

Steve Hsu: Yeah, it's not just being, because a lot of physicists wouldn't really necessarily have particularly deep thoughts on this because they may not care about this question. You have to be a physicist who's also interested in things like cognitive science and AI and stuff like that.

Right. So, I guess the way I would say it is that, you know, there are many parts of information processing of our brains that we're not consciously aware of. So, our consciousness is this really sort of thin, foamy layer at the top of all the computation that's going on in our brains. And, quite often things are going on which that conscious layer is not aware of, and only then becomes aware of after, in effect, a decision has been made.

But the conscious decision, the conscious layer perceives it as an active decision. decision that it made when in fact, maybe it was determined by lower level processes. And so that, you know, you might ask, why do we need this conscious layer? Well, it may be that it's got evolutionary advantages for the brain to perceive itself as an autonomous organism that makes decisions and those decisions, you know, have consequences.

so I guess there isn't a simple answer. I think it's some kind of emergent property of all the computations going on in our brains. You know, one of the big things people are concerned about is, you know, could we build an AGI which, quote, isn't conscious. It doesn't have the perception of perceiving itself thinking or perceiving itself at a moment in time and having to make a decision at that moment in time. Etc, etc.

So I think these are all very deep questions. Now, whether we'll ever have sort of clean answers to these questions is very unclear to me.

Arx-Han: No, thank you. I'm, I, I was very curious about it because I know, you know, you have a, you have an opinion on, I think, every important question of our time. So, you know, yeah,

Steve Hsu: I know that your characters actually have the main character, the two main characters actually have a conversation about free will and determinism and, even I think at one point, many worlds, quantum mechanics, which I, which I like, I would say in terms of free will and consciousness, it's possible again, like assuming the sort of maximal materialist kind of interpretation of science, it's possible that we have only the illusion of free will and consciousness. But nevertheless, those are very powerful things in the phenomenology of our lives.

Arx-Han: Certainly, certainly, I mean, without free will, I mean, it's hard to maintain moral responsibility. And, you know, that's, that's one of the topics that, you know, sort of ricochets around the narrative.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, you know, my own thinking about this, this is just very personal, it's not normative for other people, is that I might accept that I'm a, even almost deterministic machine that's responding to inputs and the way that DNA structured my brain and all these other things. But almost for just aesthetic reasons, I want, you know, there's certain states of the world that I prefer to others. There's a certain ugliness that I'd rather not have in the world. There's a certain ugliness in the way that I live my life or that I would not like to have. So in a way like that sense of morality or purpose or meaning is emergent, you know, from aspects of me that I don't control. But they all, in my mind, they're almost aesthetic.

They're almost aesthetic choices of just what, you know, what is a better world? What is a worse world? And I think it's not inconsistent to say that, yeah, I'm just a deterministic, you know, machine executing some algorithm. Nevertheless, I do have some kind of sense of meaning and moral system that I've developed.

I don't think those things are really in contradiction. So I don't think nihilism is a necessary consequence of the realization that you're a machine.

Arx-Han: Yeah, I, I would agree with that. And, and I think you can have a completely deterministic account of people being agentic and non agentic, comparatively speaking. So I'm totally aligned with that view.

Steve Hsu: Good. So, last thing before we turn to literature as a broad subject. Let's stick with philosophy for one second.

I think you said you had not read Nickland when you wrote the book. But then like later someone told you hey your book is basically, you know, a Nickland themed book. Is that true?

Arx-Han: You know, funny enough, it's, so it's 99 percent true. So the one thing, so basically I, I wrote the vast majority of this book before I read any Land. And the one thing that I read by him was a very famous essay, called Hell Baked, which appeared on his Xenosystems blog, I think 10 plus years ago. And it's this very kind of potent rhetorical account of what we might just characterize as Darwinian nihilism. You know, he refers to human beings as genetic survival monsters born out of, you know, an infinite cauldron of suffering or something like that.

And what I, what I, what I respected about that essay is, I mean, it's, it's, it's an incredibly powerful essay. I recommend that everybody read it. It's called Hell Baked. Meltdown is also, of course, an exceptional essay. What I think is so powerful about this is, you know, it takes the problem of suffering seriously and places it within the philosophical context of evolution.

And when I say philosophical context rather than scientific context, what I mean by that is, I think, it is, I think, very easy to be incredibly disturbed by the quantity of suffering that has been produced by biological evolution, right? I mean, how many, how many conscious animals have been, you know, torn apart under the jaws of another animal or, you know, devoured from within by parasites or you know, died hungry and alone, much, much less human beings, right?

And so I would say that, my fixation in the novel on this, this question of Darwinian nihilism, was a case of sort of convergent evolution in that I did not read Land, with any depth or awareness at all, with the exception of that essay, which I only read, you know, near the tail end of finishing the manuscript.

And so, I'm not deeply familiar with Land even now. I have a number of his books that I do intend to read. I understand that a lot of his work is rather esoteric and, and, you know, if you, a lot of these continental philosophy guys, it's, it's, don't necessarily communicate their ideas in the clearest possible way.

And they're, they're, they're really doing is a kind of a mixture of sort of elaborate kind of.word-cel artifices or, or literary stunts or literary stylistic experimentation that throws in some kind of argument in there from time to time, right? You know, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking of Baudrillard, of course, we, unfortunately, I'm not, I'm not a level 10 word-cel Steve, so I couldn't understand Baudrillard, but, Land is mostly legible, Land is mostly legible, legible to me, excuse me.

But yeah, I, I, look, I think, a lot of society and scientists, I think, didn't necessarily come to terms with the, the seeming, the apparent built in nihilism of a Darwinian account of human origins and human behavior.

And Leia just confronts it head on and he says, look, just look into the void. This is where we came from. You and I, we came from hell. We came from eons of pain and suffering, right? And there's something that's very quasi theological about that. You know, that I think is very powerful and, and, and very profound at the same time.

So sorry, that's a, yeah, go ahead. That's a long winded answer to your

Steve Hsu: That was a great answer. I share your views of continental philosophy and also, also of, of land. I think he says a lot of profound things, but a lot of it's very esoteric and impressionistic. Maybe that is the way you would say it. That's a very, like in physics and math, that's a very negative term to use for someone's paper.

If you'd say your paper is very impressionistic, it means you don't like clearly defined things and it's sharp and crisp. But, I like land and. You know, this conversation just brought to mind something, which is that, you know, Land and I interacted a fair bit, over the internet like 10, 15 years ago.

And, I always meant to look him up when I was in Shanghai, because I think he lives in Shanghai now. And I was just in Shanghai and I didn't look him up. So anyway, I just suddenly realized that and felt bad about it. But, but anyway, yes, your book evoked certain aspects of Land's thought to me.

Arx-Han: Yeah, that's wow. What a small world. I mean, who do you not know? I mean, that's wow. I guess you, you, yeah,

Steve Hsu: At a certain level of interesting people, it's kind of a small world. So, so, you know, I mean, so like he, I don't know if he still does, but the, when his handle was SheKnowsSystems, he followed me and we, he would often quote tweet stuff that I tweeted and stuff like this, so I think that's how we kind of got to know each other.

Well, sorry, just to interrupt you and go on a bit of a tangent. Yo

Arx-Han: u know, in, I don't know if you've read his famous essay Meltdown from, I think, the early or mid 90s, but there's this famous line in there, where he says, you know, neo China arrives from the future, right, where he basically sort of probably on HBD grounds was essentially predicting, you know, the, you know, the, the rise of China and, and, and I, I find that very interesting because, you know, my memories of the nineties, although I was obviously quite young at the time because I'm a millennial, but you know, it's, it's, it was just inconceivable to me that it never even occurred to me that China could, you know, reach technological parity with the West at any point, you know, until, until maybe a couple of years ago, frankly, and, you know, I, I, yeah, so it was quite interesting, a prediction for, you know, some random obscure British philosopher too.

Steve Hsu: Well, to be honest, that might be our point of convergence many years ago, that we both saw this coming or saw the possibility of it coming, well in advance of other people. I don't think we converged on, you know, because I wrote posts about nihilism or, you know, the horrible suffering caused by Darwinian evolution.

I don't usually comment on stuff like that, but, but, just for your interest, I would point to, you know, the, the white racialists who wrote in the early 20th century actually were most worried about the rise of East Asia. At that time, they were mainly talking about Japan. So they kind of thought Japan would become the dominant power in the east and that they would raise China to an advanced level and together that civilization would threaten the white world. And there are explicit writings about this sort of thing from say the 1920s which you can go back and read, you know, by Madison Grant and other people like this.

Um,Lothrop stuttered. Anyway, they wrote about this. They were very clear eyed about this. And actually, a lot of the anti immigration stuff, keeping Chinese out of America, was actually because these people thought they would be out competed by the Chinese. And in fact, we're being outcompeted by the Chinese in California, you know, people building the railroads or running small stores or restaurants or laundries, they realize these guys were actually very formidable economic competitors and didn't want them.

So, it's interesting because like, yeah, by the time 1990s rolled around, yeah, you wouldn't necessarily think this was possible, but people in the 100 years, almost 100 years before that thought it was definitely a possibility.

Arx-Han: That's fascinating. I wasn't aware of that particular history, although I, of course, you know, I've, I was broadly aware of things like, you know, the, the original yellow peril and stuff of that nature. Right. Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Part of the yellow peril was that these people are horrible and their civilization is very different from ours and we don't like it. But, but part of it was they're actually going to out compete us. And, in fact, if you go even further back, like, around the time of like George Washington, you know, all the silver in the world was accumulating in China because China could make porcelain and, and, and would sell tea to the West and stuff like this in the West didn't have much to offer.

In fact, a very lucrative trade for ship captains around that time in the United States was to bring furs to China in exchange for silver and porcelain and other goods. And at that time, you know, you can read writings of sea captains who are operating, say around the time of George Washington, like the American revolution.

Who would write that China was much more advanced than the European civilizations? So all this has been suppressed like you wouldn't know this unless you really looked at the source material, but there was a very recent time when Europeans thought the Chinese were more advanced than them.

Arx-Han: Oh, that's, that's incredibly fascinating. I, I didn't, I didn't know that it had occurred with that level of recency. I thought the previous point of parity was centuries removed, like multiple centuries removed rather than maybe two or three.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, actually, it's only been since the late 1700s or early I would say kind of early to mid 1800s that the divergence really happened between the East and West. So, and, and prior to that, the Europeans actually thought the Chinese were more advanced.Another guy who wrote about this a lot is Leibniz.

Leibniz was obviously a mathematician and philosopher, but also a big polymath. And he was a huge advocate of Chinese civilization, even though he never traveled to China, but what he knew about it, he liked. And so he was a big advocate for Chinese civilization.

Arx-Han: Oh, that's incredibly interesting. I had no idea Leibniz was, or even had any opinions on, you know, China at all.

If you just type in just type in Leibniz China into Google and you'll find tons and tons of material on this.I will do.

Steve Hsu: Yeah okay.

So back to the state of literary fiction. I've heard you talk about this. I agree with your diagnosis. Just to summarize for the audience, the gatekeepers for who can publish a quite serious novel these days tend to be super woke, super feminized, and very uninterested, if not outright hostile, to novels which are really about a kind of very masculine male experience.

And so, consequently, there's a whole set of fiction that, you know, in the days of Hemingway, or, you know, even much more recently than that, would find its way into prestige publishers, now just can't be published. And, I think you've spoken pretty eloquently about this.

Arx-Han: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting sort of almost like an empirical question to, to theorize about because the change has been so stark, right? I mean, you, you, up to a certain historical point, you can almost, you know, identify each literary era by, you know, various kinds of prominence, you know, white male, let's just say for lack of a better term, straight white male novelists.

And then it's hard to be precise about this, but let's say perhaps roughly, you know, 20 or so years ago, maybe 25 years ago, with the possible exception of Houellebecq, they all kind of seem to sort of, and, and Cormac McCarthy, who I guess now has been canceled, I suppose, after his death, but, they all kind of sort of just seem to disappear. They seem to recede. And it seems that the, the kind of androgenic male writer, the male writer who's interested in examining male interiority, male psychology, in presenting a sort of unvarnished, you know, examination of, both that from a kind of identitarian aspect, but also from like a lived experience aspect, it seems like all of these guys kind of just get shut out of the, of the literary ecosystem.

And there are, there are multiple different sorts of analytical lenses that can be brought to bear to account for, you know, why this shift has been so dramatic. Because it certainly wasn't historically always the case that bookstores in general were sort of female coded, in the broad sense, right?

And I have a couple of different theories as to why, you know, this has happened. I think, you know, the, the sort of easy diagnosis is that,publishing was sort of, there was a kind of, you know, quote unquote, demographic replacement in the upper echelons of these, elite literary publishing houses where, you know, affluent white female liberals sort of, kind of, you know, ascended, ascended the ranks and then,sort of, there was this tipping point where they kind of became more of a kind of majority demographic and then naturally, when you have any kind of, gatekeeping function, that's populated by a sort of more culturally or,in terms of class or in terms of, political orientation, homogenous grouping, well, naturally that's going to become a narrower aperture, a narrower type of filter, right?

And so, the term that I use rather than feminization is, basically a term that I just sort of invented, I call it psychodemographic class capture. Because I don't think it's merely a question of, quote, unquote, feminization, I think it's the result of a confluence of multiple intersecting factors, right.

It's not just that, the gender balance in these institutions, sort of, went beyond a certain tipping point. It's also that there is a, broader kind of, class element to it, and it's also that, that sort of, class element is itself defined by a sort of PMC style, tight consensus on what we might call leading edge secular progressive morality.

Certainly it's possible to call this, you know, quote unquote wokeism, as such, but I think because of how dynamic and, and, and, and how much that, you know, that term mutates at the frontier, I kind of just use my own sort of language to describe that.

But the way that I would essentially describe it is as follows, which is, you know, one notion of creativity is about positive expression. Okay. So one notion of creativity is, you know, I have a character or a story that I want to tell, and I'm interested in sharing that with the world, distributing that and kind of, placing that in the minds of a group of recipients, right? Another version of this process is a more defensively oriented process. So my theory is that we kind of go through these cycles, these macro cycles of comparative, libertinism in the creative fields and comparative strictness, okay? And whether a field is comparatively, sort of free or comparatively strict, just takes on whatever the contemporary, prevailing system of morality and culture, dictates it to be, right?

So, I think we just happen to be in an era where leading edge secular progressive morality and its moral dictates are ascendant and have effectively sort of captured this class of PMCs who are the gatekeepers, and they've greatly narrowed that aperture in terms of what can be published. Because any sort of really brutal or unvarnished description of male interiority just can't get through these gatekeepers, really at all right now.

And I think the experience of the modern male novelist in contemporary terms is that his manuscript, his story, is almost sort of a political campaign where he feels compelled because of institutional incentives to minimize the attack surface of the story, to minimize the attack surface of the novel.

So Eric Howell, who's a, a, blog, a prominent blogger on Substack writes about this idea of minimizing attack surface. And the reason is, is that the dynamics of living in a sort of purity culture, where people are, are kind of searching for transgressions, right? Even, even, you know, the concept, of course, of microaggression is interesting because it contains within it a sort of logic, right? It contains within it a sort of search function. Right. It's like, oh yes, I need to locate and destroy the aggression, even if it is microscopically sized. Right. And funny enough, I say that as a person who actually believes in the concept of a microaggression as actually being, valid. Now, that's a bit of a sidebar.

But, to summarize my points here, basically, I would say a couple of things. I think one, I think the zeitgeist and the culture, and therefore cultural institutions, oscillate between periods of having a libertine sort of attitude and periods of having a strict attitude, right? And point number two, I think we're currently in a sort of secularized purity culture in literary institutions specifically where, you know, manuscripts are having to pass through sensitivity readers, who are actively searching for, impurities, you know, moral infractions that might lend themselves to, different, negative isms of a different sort.

And three, I'd say that the end result of this tight system of restrictions is to kind of collapse the artist, the literary artist, into a sort of tight and narrow box, a kind of coffin. I call it sort of the purity coffin, where they feel compelled to analyze their own story for moral flaws that need to be excised as if they were impurities.

And what this does is it simply imposes too much fear upon the working artist and, and it constrains and prevents them from really, being their best selves and producing the best possible work. So, sorry, forgive my, my, my sort of, extended rant there, but I think it's just such a rich topic that has so many different interesting layers to it because it sits within this broader cultural context that we're all, of course, living in.

I

Steve Hsu: Now, from a market perspective, I mean, ostensibly these publishing houses are businesses, although, as we all know, for ideological reasons or whatever reasons, often the gatekeepers will damage their own businesses.you know, Why aren't there emerging Other presses, which sell to the demographic that wants to read these, I guess you would call them androgenic or sort of male, you know, novels, which address issues of male interiority.

Are we seeing presses like that start to appear or are artists like yourself able to just sell directly on Amazon to that readership? How is this going to equilibrate?

Arx-Han: I think, I think broadly speaking, we will see this equilibrium, this equilibrium sort of restore itself, but I think there are some additional considerations to take into place. So to answer your question. Yes, there are some Alternative presses that are popping that are popping up. You see, for example, I think Skyhorse Publishing has an imprint called Arcade, they're publishing writers like Matthew Gazda, Noah Kuhman.

There are, of course, you know, notable examples like the minimalist auto fiction writer, delicious tacos, who's, who's achieved not inconsistent, not insignificant level of, of, success, just selling books directly on Amazon.

And, I am also aware, for example, of guys like, Dan Baltic and Matthew Pegas of the New Right podcast, who are going to have a press, I think it's called New Ritual.

So I think these things are happening, but I think notably, you know, the absolute figures are still, in comparison, quite small. And it could just be that in this previous kind of 20 year period where, it became very difficult for, you know, let's say androgenic fiction to be published, it could just be that that market has kind of shrunk because men are now conditioned to you know, video games and pornography, essentially, as their primary sources of entertainment.

Steve Hsu: Yeah.

Arx-Han: And, and lastly, from what I, the latest data that I've seen is that, Generation Z is sort of almost sub literate, on average, and, and, and really they can only get through sort of short form video or long form video, they're watching video essays rather than reading. So, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if literary fiction, becomes a sort of conservatory art form in the age of the, you know, dope, dopaminergic hyper stimuli, right, especially as, entertainment becomes, you know, AI optimized, especially as entertainment becomes increasingly free delivered through AR and VR experiences that maybe approach photorealism.

And I think, I think, you know, the we word-cels have to have to accept that I think.

You know, I love fiction. I love literary fiction. I think it's a beautiful art form. I wish I had, you know, more time to write and sometimes I even wish I was a real purist and I could just live in absolute rather than mere relative poverty and just write novels all the time.

But I, I think, I think we just have to accept that, you know, this is probably going to become something like a conservatory art form that's consumed by what is functionally a cognitive elite who, can, are still able to get through long form text. And, you know, maybe that's okay. You know, maybe, you know, in 15 years or 20 years, you know, the, you know, the machine God will, you know, give you a pat on the back and say, hey, this is a really good book, man. You know, like by human standards, this is excellent work, you know, sort of thing. So,that's, that's, that's my broad view.

Steve Hsu: Let me, let me close with something related to that. and I think you mentioned AI.

You are a pseudonymous author. No one knows whether, I actually, I think I've heard you say you didn't use any AI in writing your novel, but nobody knows for sure how your novel was written. Why couldn't I, as a publisher, train AIs with very specific personality and literary tastes, and have them write novels under a pseudonym or maybe a real sounding name? And, you know, for the subset of readers that particularly like the fiction generated by that AI, why, why could I not, you know, establish that, AI as a, you know, ex you know, highly esteemed writer with a broad following? It doesn't seem implausible to me.

Yeah,

Arx-Han: So I, the only barriers to that would be technical barriers because, you know, marketing is, is, a solved problem, right? We sort of know how to market books in moderation. To an extent in the modern age, which it's basically a combination of parasocial relationships and online e celebrity and things of that nature, right?

It's, you know, digital advertising, et cetera, et cetera. Like there is, there is some ability for publishers to take and construct these literary personas, I think.

But to answer the real meat of the question here, which is, can you train a model to write high quality literary fiction? I would assume that it is possible. There was someone, it might have been Sarah Constantine, although I don't remember, who had trained a model on her own prose, to mimic her own prose, and it was actually very good, from what I recall, or at least it was quite good. Of course, if you use an off the shelf model like Claude or GPT 4 and you say, hey, write me a description of this room in the style of David Foster Wallace, or in the style of Cormac McCarthy, the output is very obviously not written in that style.

It feels very average, but I think nobody has really just cared enough to tune these models toward literary prose yet.

Steve Hsu: On a technical level, I'm sure it's possible. It's just nobody's tried to do it yet. But it definitely would be possible to have a model that produces prose in a, in a consistent style with a consistent viewpoint. And that AI could be known as a quote, writer of renown. So I think that is technically possible.

It's just that I don't, I don't, I think in the list of things to AI ify, this is kind of pretty far down the, the, the priority list. But I am reminded that, that, you know, my friend Ayla told me that most really big OnlyFans presences are already, or have been already for a while using AI to, you know, farm simps, so to speak.

And, you know, if they can farm simps using AI, I think they can also write, eventually write, good literary novels.

Arx-Han: Yeah, I agree.

And,probably my next novel will incorporate, a sort of reaction to that because I do think, Steve, that we are in for not just mass technological unemployment, but with it, an enormous crisis of human meaning, particularly for artists, and I think we've only just begun to see that because, you know, if writing is distilled thinking and if thinking is computation, then it follows that a writer's meaning in life comes from computation that happens to be brain based computation. And when we arrive at the inflection point where, machineprose can meet or exceed, human skill, at the upper echelon of, of the literary writer, I think that will be a, a true crisis for the, for the word-cel, you know, in the same way that, you know, you know, the loom was a crisis for the automated loom was a crisis for, you know, whoever's doing it by hand or whatever.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I, I think the, the, the role of the AI here is, in one sense, just making very obvious the problems which, you know, the narrator of your novel already understood, you know, through abstraction, right? He, but through abstraction, he realized, well, I, if I'm in a machine built out of atoms, you know, how could I possibly have any problems?

Meaning, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact that I can build a thing out of Silicon that actually writes as well or better than you, or writes as entertainingly, as a great human writer, that will just make the whole thing just very, very viscerally real for many more people.

Arx-Han: Yeah. And I, I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't think that was in some sense, a tragedy, although of course, at the same time, I'm sure this technology will, you know, produce all kinds of incredible breakthroughs. So I think it's just going to be very weird. And actually I have a personal goal, Steve, which is, you know, I want to, I want to hopefully get my next novel out before, you know, these LLMs have been tuned to high, high quality prose. So I can say, Hey, you know, I got it in before, you know, the gate closed. Right. And, and, so we'll, we'll see if I can write fast enough.

Steve Hsu: I'll tell you something I noticed just in the last year, which is that, in the past, it's been very hard for, for example, Chinese or Japanese scientists to write really good English, in their scientific papers. So they would have to be very heavily copyedited, like if you had a collaborator who was a native speaker, that person would, you know, have to spend a lot of time editing the paper so it read well.

But what's happened just in the last year or two is because the models have gotten so good, I now routinely read papers in which every author is, say, a Chinese scientist, say there's 10 authors, I was just reading one an hour before you and I got on this podcast, an AI paper, all the authors are from universities and institutes in Shanghai.

But it's written extremely well, and I know exactly what they did. They wrote it in Chinese and then they passed it through an LLM and it reads extremely well in English as if it were written by a native speaker. So, just even that change has happened just in, in a couple of years.

Arx-Han: Yeah. Well, I, I just to, just to take that and run with that tangent a little bit. I mean, I, one of the most fascinating things I find about your podcast is your, your sort of, contrarian predictions about, you know, Chinese or PRC techno capital acceleration based on your calculation about, you know, their, their human capital stem pool.

I find that, you know, deeply, deeply fascinating. I think it's, it's been, you know, fascinating. That model has proven much more empirically correct, than a lot of the, you know, mainstream commentators, opinions have been, but, if I were to bring that back to, you know, Asian American literary fiction, I think what's very, what's going to be very interesting is to see the, evolution in Asian American identity, if and when, you know, the PRC does reach that techno capital,point of parity and perhaps later than even just outright exceeds, you know, our rate of, of, of development. And, I mean, I'll admit, I like to follow the conversation between that TR Taxis fellow.

And you on, on Twitter. It's all incredibly entered. And I don't, I have to, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Right. Cause I'm not a technical guy, but it's all very interesting and entertaining. And then, you know, following DeepSeek and all this stuff, like it's just, we're living in history, right?

Steve Hsu: Oh, absolutely.

Steve Hsu: It's an incredibly special time with the rise of AI and also the rise of, you know, East Asian civilization, you know, maybe back to its place, historically as, as one of the leading, you know, centers of knowledge and innovation. So yeah, incredibly interesting time. I thank you for joining me on this podcast.

My guest was ARX Han. His novel is called Incel. Please, buy it. Thank you very much.

Arx-Han: Thank you.